secondlifefandomcom-20200214-history
Second Life Wiki:Merge/Second Life Through The Ages
Planning Reportedly, this all started when Philip was in the shower. He envisioned this vast green, continuous landscape, distributed across multiple servers... and went on to build it. Andrew recently said in the forums that LL was started as a hardware company geared towards the research and development of haptics. They needed a virtual world to go with their hardware, and so they started building what became LindenWorld and later Second Life. This hardware is also said to still exist, with the nickname "The Rig", sitting in a box somewhere in Linden Lab offices, no mention has been given if it works with SL. Development Some early experiments are said to have been: - Simple creation of cubes on a flat terrain - Sophisticated water simulation, where you dropped an object on water and waves spread across sims. This particular effect was dropped since communicating information about water ripples took too much bandwidth. Alpha Alpha started on March 2002, under the name Lindenworld. The first players were Steller Sunshine and Paul Zeeman. Other notable Alpha members include Mac Beach, Flyk Escher, BuhBuhCuh Fairchild and bUTTONpUSHER Jones. Interesting bits about Alpha: * Snakes and birds roamed the land, feeding on abandoned objects. * You could shoot trees, watch them catch fire, and spread it to other trees. * You could "Edit" other people's avatars, and move them around. Steller apparently had lots of fun throwing Mac around in the early days. :) * No economy or currency. * Sims had no name. At first there were only 6 of them, but it grew to 9. Beta Closed beta began on November 2002, with public beta opening on April 2003. Start of public beta: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/30/2342221&tid=206&tid=10 1.0 1.0 was more or less the same as late beta, except that it had a different login screen. It was pretty much just a version number change that was implemented on the same day that SL went live in 6/03. Official launch: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/23/235244&tid=206&tid=209&tid=10 1.1 1.1 brought a slightly revised economy that aimed to stifle tax evasion. This caused a lot of drama, namely the death of Americana. There were major graphical changes, like a new terrain texture, animated hair/clothes, bump mapping and SHINY! Non-physical object motion became damped by default and they also introduced a new particle system and vehicle API. 1.2 Version 1.2 brought huge changes to the world, resulting in a complete social reorganization. Some say that after 1.2 it was "all about the money". http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/27/2048246 1.3 1.3 allowed scripts to communicate with the outside world, bringing incoming email and XML-RPC functions. 1.4 Custom animations for avatar bodies were introduced, which opened a lot of doors to social interaction through creative expression. 1.5 This was mainly a bugfix/overhaul version. A number of server-side changes were implemented to support changes in 1.6 and possibly 1.7. Ironically, 1.5 was one of the most bug-filled releases of SL, having been rushed to release with too little time for Previewing and bug-testing. 1.6 Linden Lab has just launched this new version, featuring streaming video, chat bubbles, and a redesigned interface for object construction. 1.7 1.7 is supposed to bring us Havok 2. The new physics engine will greatly help performance and stability, possibly even allowing for the introduction of new features such as new types of joints and even ragdolls. After 1.7, it will probably be possible to specify a collision mask different from the object's actual look, by linking phantom objects to physical ones. This will allow for vehicles with more than 31 prims. 2.0 1.8 will probably be renamed 2.0. It will feature a dramatic improvement to the graphics engine, with greatly increased draw distances and more realistic lighting.